31 May 2014

Laurie Lee's Life has gone
missing! Last Autumn, preparing for a
trip to the Cotswolds and mindful of the impending centenary of Laurie Lee's
birth, I read Valerie Grove's biography, entitled The Well-Loved Stranger. I then laid it aside on a shelf, intending to
revisit it when I had reread Cider with Rosie, etc. Then, just the other day, another trip to the
Cotswolds about to happen, I simply couldn't find the book. I've searched high, and low, and behind and
above, and it is nowhere to be found.
Laurie Lee's Life has gone missing!

Which, actually, is not a bad
metaphor for the truth. Lee might have
been well-loved, but I think he
almost certainly remained a stranger
to all, including his wife and daughter(s).
The barman of The Woolpack,
the pub in Lee's village
of Sladonly metres above the house where Lee
died on May 13th 1997, and where his widow, Katherine, still lives, recounted
to me how Lee would telephone his wife to drive round and pick him up when he
had drunk enough. Katherine still visits
the pub herself, preferring a daily half pint of Old Spot with a shot of gin in
it to the lengthy sessions her late husband held dear.

Jessy, their daughter, who now manages Lee's
estate, living next door to her mother, had a very troubled upbringing, leading
to two breakdowns and a failed marriage.
She then trained as a psychotherapist and until her father's final
illness worked with homeless people in Gloucester. Now she is fully engaged in the Lee heritage,
and, as she told Costwold Life in an interview last year, I was so overwhelmed by being out of control of my world, but I’ve
learned to take back my control and that has enabled me to have this passion,
now, for bringing Laurie back for his centenary - and for ever.

The centenary will be well-celebrated, for Lee is still well-loved, and Slad is
a beautiful place, and The Woolpack
is a beautiful pub, even though the life is missing.....

Lee attained the status of
National Treasure during his lifetime because he was the author of two slim
books, though he also published some poetry and other prose pieces, worked for
the BBC, and moved in exalted literary and cinematic circles (his brother Jack
was a film director, responsible for The Wooden Horse and A
Town Like Alice among others).
His most famous publication was Cider with Rosie, which came out in
1959, which for many years became compulsory reading in schools, recreating, as
it does, an English world which will still gladden the heart of many a UKIP
voter. It tells the story of Laurie's
childhood in Slad, brought up by an indefatigable mother in a traditional stone
cottage, surrounded by three older half-sisters and two brothers. He never really knew his father, who had
started a new life in London
after the first World War, and he was confined to the village, and the valley,
scored by seasons, and punctuated by events such as a trip to the distant
seaside, or an outing to Stroud.....

Stroud

In First Love Lee says I don't think I ever discovered sex, it seemed
to be always there..... This was probably due to my English country
upbringing, where life was open as a cucumber frame, and sex a constant force,
like the national grid, occasionally boosted by thundery weather..... This may go some way to explaining how sex
seemed to permeate his life, a vague pink
streak running through his lifescape.....
Jessy tells of him as an
incorrigible flirt. Up until the day he died, aged 82, he had an eye for an
attractive woman. When his sight began to fail, he would simply clutch his stick
and wait for the first pretty girl to come along and get her to escort him over
the road (quoted by Beth Hale in The Mail Online, 23/2/2013).

Having read every word of Valerie Grove's
more than 560 pages, this is putting it nicely.
Part of Jessy's problem was that the very day she was born so was her
half-sister's daughter, so while she was born
in the autumn and was a late fall in my life, and lay purple and dented like a
little bruised plum..... she was not
really The Firstborn, and she had to compete with someone [Yasmin] who
she thought of as an unusually kind and
generous cousin (ibid). It would not
be until many years later, when Jessy was a young woman, that her father would
tell her that Yasmin was also her half-sister, even though he had recorded in his
diary, on the day they both were born: Monday
Sept 30, 1963, two girls, daughter & granddaughter.

Rosebank - the early home

In itself, to the casual reader,
this may not seem so difficult, but when the entire catalogue of dalliances is
unveiled, a pattern emerges, and one cannot help but think of the recent fallen
stars whose weaknesses may not have been so dissimilar to those of Laurence
Edward Alan "Laurie" Lee, MBE (26 June 1914 - 13 May 1997)....

The back of the Woolpack, with Kathy and Jessy's homes in the foreground

But back to Slad, and the England
we have perhaps, as the Penguin blurb writer suggested, traded for the petrol engine.
Recalling life in a remote
Cotswold village some fifty (now one hundred) years ago, Laurie Lee conveys the semi-peasant spirit of a
thousand-year-old tradition. And it
is for this we give thanks. My paternal
grandmother, though a Sussex girl, lived in very much the same milieu, with the
seasons constantly chivvying the well-worn folk, driving the patterns of the
days, and dictating the menus, the clothing, the habits, of all who lived the
daily life of rural, pre-commercial, pre-digital England.

And I do not pretend that it was
cosy, nor gentle, nor as smooth as a chocolate box left on the back shelf of a
car in the sun...... This was bucolic to
the degree that bucolism, combined with a tendency to enjoy stimulating
liquors, became bucoholism, and Laurie Lee, frequently in need of pastoral
rehabilitation from the Chelsea Arts Club, and the pubs of Fulham, was the perfect Bucoholic.....

Nor is this a question that in
any way intertwines with the phenomenon of UKIP. No politics disturb the vale of
half-forgotten memories. This was a
world of fruitful development within restricted circumstances. It was different. As a growing up in Chad,
or Patagonia, or JiangsuProvince, would be
different to now and to then. For me the
treasure is in the sensuous recreation of a world of a family and a village in
phases of active growth and interaction before I came to living myself. It is a little plastic orb of life that snows
when you shake it, but which you cannot enter nor change. It was. And Laurie recorded it for us, perhaps in a
subtler way than anyone before or since.
Indoors, our mother was cooking
pancakes, her face aglow from the fire.
There was a smell of sharp lemon and salty batter, and a burning hiss of
oil. The kitchen was dark and convulsive
with shadows, no lights had yet been lit.....

Looking down towards Stroud

I can see, and smell, my grannie
in this. My heart carries traces of this
world and I am so grateful that someone has recorded it for me to reach into,
like a photograph album without pictures, like a piece of music without
instruments.

His later writings succeed in
different ways, mainly in mythologizing himself. A long defunct blurb for As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning
says: It was 1934. The young man walked to London from the security of the Cotswolds to
make his fortune. He was to live by
playing the violin and by a year's labouring on a London building site. Then, knowing one Spanish phrase, he decided
to see Spain..... Thirty years later Laurie Lee has captured
the atmosphere of the Spain
he saw with all the freshness..... Blah,
Blah, Blah.... It's a lovely book, and
when I first read it I wanted to do the same.
But, compared with Cider with Rosie, it is a dead
goldfish (even though it is a very entertaining read).

I realise now where Laurie's Life
is..... Having ploughed through the
incessant detail of liaison and patronage, having struggled with the telephone
directory style and the spiralling streptococcus of second hand self adoration,
I think I took the book to the Co-op and laid it on the charity book shelf. I thought I am not going to read this again,
and perhaps someone else will have a week or so with nothing better to do. So Laurie's Life has been recycled. I hope it has done some good.....

And I am on Swifts Hill. In 1967 the Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust
bought this 25 hectare tract of ancient Cotswold common land from the Elliott
family. From earliest times this
free-draining limestone pasture hill would have been grazed by sheep providing for the local wool industry, and this created a rich wildlife habitat for flowers,
insects and birds, which now survives thanks to its protection as a Site of
Special Scientific Interest.

Swifts Hill

I lie on my back, trying hard not
to crush early-purple orchids or cowslips, taking care not to disturb any of
the twenty-nine species of butterflies that live here. I gaze across at Slad, and the Woolpack, and
Kathy's cottage, where Laurie expired in a warm shimmering of sunshine
seventeen years ago now. Next to me lies
Rosie; she was yellow and dusty with
buttercups and seemed to be purring in the gloom. And I take a sip of cider, never to be forgotten, that first long
secret drink of golden fire, juice of those valleys and of that time, wine of
wild orchards, of russet summer, of plump red apples, and Rosie's burning cheeks. Never to be forgotten, or ever tasted
again.....

﻿﻿

﻿

The Sunday Times, March 6th 1977

Laurie's Life may be missing, but his Spirit lives on! Happy Centenary!

24 May 2014

Perhaps it was because I was reading
Ian Rankin's Standing in Another Man's Grave on the train to Edinburgh
that I arrived with thoughts about mortality.
Not gloomy ones; just reflections on rituals of burial, and the finity of
life.

The Dugald Stewart Monument, Calton Hill

The feeling doesn't go away as I
walk up Calton Hill, past the Old Calton Burial Ground with its
austere obelisk of the Political
Martyrs' Monument, dedicated to five Botany Bay
deportees punished for their role in the fight for electoral reform in 1793. Then, atop the hill, there's the incomplete National Monument to the dead in the
Napoleonic Wars, with columns that somehow resemble more Battersea Power
Station than the Parthenon. Then there
is the inverted telescope of the NelsonMonument, remembering Trafalgar (what will become
of this come independence?) and the iconic Dugald
Stewart Monument, designed by William Henry Playfair (who also designed the
National Monument). Acropolis:
Necropolis!

A little while later, wandering
up the Royal Mile, a sign for the City of the Dead caught my eye, and
from then on everyone I met seemed to be dead.

David Hume, Lawnmarket

David Hume reposing half dressed by the side of the road called out to
me, To
hate, to love, to think, to feel, to see; all this is nothing but to perceive.....

David Hume, Old Calton Burial Ground

Robert Burns, Sir Walter Scott and Robert
Louis Stevenson greeted me, lifelessly, in The
Writers' Museum, which is in a seventeenth century building known,
appropriately (there is no lift), as Lady Stair's House.

The Writers' Museum, Lady Stair House (1622)

As I wandered the rooms I heard Scott, seated
at his dining table, rambling on about how he invented the clan tartans,

One Tartan Kilt (Courtesy of Walter Scott)

and
organised the visit of George IV to Scotland in 1822;

George IV was here (courtesy of Walter Scott)

then he invited
me to a game of chess. Robbie Burns,
clutching his swordstick, muttered, almost quoting Bob Dylan, My heart’s in the Highlands, my heart is not
here;/My heart’s in the Highlands a-chasing the deer..... and Stevenson showed
me the ring made from tortoiseshell and silver, inscribed Tusitala (teller of
tales), which was given to him by a Samoan chief; he was wearing this ring when
he had his fatal cerebral haemorrhage at the age of 44 (in 1894). Outside, in the flagstones of Makars' Court
(which takes its name from the Scots word for a poet or author, and also gives
its name to an honorary post for three years for the City's Literary Ambassador)
are inscriptions celebrating other Scottish writers, such as the fourteenth
century poet, John Barbour, and Sorley MacLean, who died in 1996.

Arthur's Seat, from the Castle

Up the road, the Castle broods,
full of weapons of destruction, like Mons Meg, and dead pets. There are mementoes of glory, to be sure, but
the most affecting parts, for me, were the Prisons
of War, where in 1781 some 1,000 men were incarcerated, for the most part
captured in the American War of Independence.

At that time, the old tenements of Edinburgh
were hardly less crowded, and the swamps that were once known as the Nor' Loch
(now PrincesStreetGardens)
were infamously fetid and fowl. I am
inspired, by the motto over the gate (Nemo
mi impune lacessit - watch it, pal)
and by the way the great buildings rise from the volcanic rock, a natural
glasswork blown in black and grey; and I am inspired by the views, across to
the Firth of Forth and out to Arthur's Seat. Up the OutlookTower
in the Camera Obscura I see distorted
films of shadows walking, buildings quivering, traffic shivering. Hogwarts appears out of the turrets of George
Heriot's School, and the gothic pile of the ScottMonument seems about to launch itself
skywards to leave Waverley
behind.

Hogwarts - in the Camera Obscura

I am guided by Ian Rankin through
the OldTown.
Or perhaps I am guided by Rebus.
Whichever, there's a wealth of death!

Charon will be back in a minute

The gate to the Greyfriars
Churchyard stands ajar, and I slip in to pay my respects to Greyfriars Bobby, one of the more famous dead
of this great city.

The Greyfriar's Bobby

Popularised in a
1912 novel by Eleanor Atkinson, and then sweetened by a Disney film in 1963
(which I went to see under the misapprehension that it was about Billy Bunter?)
the story is of a Skye terrier who refused to desert his deceased master, maintaining
a vigil over his grave for fourteen years.
Also in the graveyard I note some iridescent plastic flowers at the foot
of a monument.

George Buchanan, tutor to Mary Queen of Scotsand James VI of Scotland and I of England

Who, I wonder, still
reveres the memory of George Buchanan, tutor to both Mary Queen of Scots and
James VI, who died in 1582? I must brush
up my Latin, and study De Jure Regni
apud Scotos, published in
1579, condemned in 1584 and again in 1664, and burned by the University of Oxford
in 1684. Some recommendation!

The Royal's Mile - John Knox's View

At the NetherbowPort,
I meet John Knox, a hard man to like.
His house, or that that bears his name, dates from the fifteenth century
and, despite many changes, its metre-thick walls, erratic steps, painted
ceilings and tiled fireplaces evoke times, and lives, past. For part of the sixteenth century this was
the home of a jeweller and goldsmith by the name of James Mossman (executed
1573 for insurrection), who let parts of the ground floor to other
merchants. Having been ordained a
catholic, but then in exile a pupil of Calvin, from 1560 until his death in
1572 John Knox was a Minister at St Giles Cathedral, where his influential
preaching led the Scottish Reformation.
He was instrumental in the abdication in 1567 of Mary Queen of Scots,
who had resisted his entreaties to leave the Church of Rome and to adopt a more
austere lifestyle, though his own second marriage, to a sixteen year old when
he was in his fifties, did not impress her favourably.

The Royal Smile - Mary, Queen of Scots

She is reputed to have said, I
fear the prayers of John Knox more than all the assembled armies of Europe,
and indeed Knox's preference for a King
brought up as a Presbyterian had consequences for us all, partly through his
effect on the Scottish Covenanters who, in 1638, declared their right to
national sovereignty.

The empty chair - John Knox's House

The house was rescued from its
decline as a slum tenement by the Church of Scotland in 1850, and it stands as
a memorial to Knox and his circle, which included George Wishart (Wisehart),
who was burned at the stake in 1546. On
the wall of an upstairs office a board bears Knox's prayer: And
so I end....Rendering my troubled and sorrowful spirit
in the hands of the Eternal God, earnestly trusting at His good pleasure, to be
freed from the cares of this miserable life and to rest with Christ Jesus my
only hope and life.

Walter Scott paid 30 shillings to see him die.....

Tripping on the
seventh stair as I return to earth, I marvel at how one man alone can have so
much influence on a whole populace, though once more I hear the voice of David
Hume: Nothing is more surprising than the easiness with which the many are
governed by the few.

Robert Fergusson - not grave

Down Canongate I pause in
front of the statue of Robert Fergusson, whose arm is filled with pink
flowers. In his 24 years he achieved
such fame that Robbie Burns lamented him as his elder brother in the muse. His poem, Auld Riekie, caught both the life of eighteenth century OldTown,
and the public imagination...

On stair wi tub, or pat in hand,

The barefoot housemaids loo to stand,

That antrin fock may ken how snell

Auld Reikie will at morning smell:

Robert Fergusson's Grave

Following a head injury, perhaps
the result of falling downstairs, he was taken from his mother’s house and
locked in the Bedlam next to the Edinburgh
poorhouse. He died within weeks and was buried here in an unmarked grave. It was Robert Burns who, thirteen years later,
commissioned a headstone for him, and then, later still, Robert Louis Stevenson
intended to renew the stone, though he died before this was carried out. The statue, by David Annand, was unveiled in
2004. The late poet, Robert Garioch,
recalled Fergusson as: faur apairt/in
time, but fell alike in hert.....
Touching sympathy. Adam Smith, political economist and philosopher, best
known for his book The Wealth of
Nations, was also buried in this Kirkyard, in 1790.

I walk on down, passing the
curiously maritime architecture of the Scottish Parliament Building; past the
traditional Palace of Holyroodhouse, and up the path above Salisbury Crags
towards Arthur's Seat, in Holyrood Park.

But the weather closes in and soon the city is obscured, a white mist
furled across the scene like a sea of porridge.

The road to Arthur's Seat.....

A figure ahead, walking a dog, reminds me of Rebus, but faint-hearted, I
return to the comforting dark of the city streets.

As dusk settles, and rain begins
to shine the stones, I seek shelter within the enticing brightness of pubs and
bars.

The HalfWay House

A drink in The Halfway House is a
convivial treat, and then a visit to The Cafe Royale reveals a different
clientele, surrounded by opulence and fed with style.

Medusa, the Oyster Bar, Cafe Royale

Medusa at the next table turns my scallops to
stone, but I only see her through a prism.

The Gorgon leaves

Outside it is wet now, the cherry blossom plastered to the cobbles, the
ochre walls darkened by the rain.

I wander the New Town, to see Prince Albert on his
horse, catching his death no doubt, and to admire the neoclassical harmony of Charlotte Square,
which Robert Adam designed just before he died in 1791.

On the north side at number 6 is Bute House,
the official residence of the First Minister, though it seems deserted just
now, and curiously vulnerable.

A few streets away I catch up,
eventually, with Ian Rankin, drinking with Jackie Leven in The Oxford Bar, a
pub that nicely breathes a bygone air.
It was mid-evening quiet. Rebus
was seated in the back room with an IPA and the Evening News when I
arrived. I asked him if he wanted a
refill. Have I ever been known to refuse?

Drinking with Rebus - The Oxford Bar

In Standing in Another Man's Grave, John Rebus finished the
paper, while sounds of laughter came from the bar area..... He lifted the empties, preparing to join the
throng in the front room. Then he
paused, remembering the drive to Tongue and back: the isolation and stillness,
the sense of a world unchanged and unchanging.

Where are you?

Nowhere. Quite literally.

'But I prefer it here,' he told himself, making for the bar.....

I know how he feels.

Let virtue distinguish the bravePlace riches in lowest degreeThink them poorest who can be a slaveThem richest who dare to be freeBoth Sides of the TweedDick Gaughan